Providing innovative and proactive support to stakeholders, guides strategic decisions, carries the business forward, creates competitive advantage and in turn increases the value of the insight team. Here are three tips to help you rethink the product and service you deliver to your stakeholders.

Nail your big question: clearly define the business challenge you need to answer - writing it in the form of a question means you have something you can easily answer in an email topline or simple report.

Have stakeholders complete a project brief: this can get things moving faster and align everyone on the true business need.

Tighten project scope: well-designed, bite-size research can create high value for stakeholders. Projects don't always have to be big, and insight communities mean you can do research you wouldn't normally have time or budget for.

Take the initiative: in the past, insight teams have been guilty of waiting around to be asked, before they took initiative to execute research projects. Watch out for questions that come up in meetings - get answers to them before you even receive the request.

Set stage for other research: doing exploratory work with your insight community as a first step helps you get further down the line for your bigger project.

2. Deliver more creative reports

Business today is fast paced; no one has time to read through a huge report. To disseminate quality information speedily, insight teams need simple, memorable, engaging and interactive reports.

Infographics: a visually engaging, smart graphic tells the story at a glance, and is easily shared. If you don't have the creative resources in your team, you could try a one-page report template instead. See some of our favourite infographics below:

Custom microsites: customized, web-based reporting applications push research insights to different audiences internally. Feeding the right information to the right people will create efficiencies as they can view what is relevant to them.

Interactive Custom Dashboards: incorporate large amounts of data (equivalent to a 300-400 paged report) into a digestible and dynamic dashboard. Users pull relevant data at a macro or micro level using filters. Dashboards are particularly useful for tracking data.

3. Market your insight team internally

Create promotional items: videos, customer profiles, contextual stories etc. help to bring insights to life and your stakeholders closer to the customer.

Provide case-studiesand WOW decks: showcase what individual stakeholders are learning more broadly in the organization.

Distribute an internal newsletter: aggregate insights across all of your research projects and distribute to your stakeholders on a regular basis.